HD Tune and Quick Bench

HD Tune

HD Tune tests over the entire surface of the drive or NAND in this case, by systematically writing or reading over every LBA on the attached storage. The initial design for HD Tune was for the testing of hard disk drives. As the drive progresses in the test, it would illustrate the loss of speed as the head moved from the outer portion of the platter to the inner regions.

This approach can also be uniquely suited for SSDs, as it will highlight any inconsistent or erratic behavior in the SSD as it fills with data.

The read only average latency remains remarkably consistent across the entire drive during testing, an expected result when using premium SLC NAND. There is very little variability between the minimum, maximum and average read speeds.

The write speed is remarkably consistent, with a flat line of 250MB/s across the entire surface of the NAND. This isn't surprising with the implementation of SLC NAND.

Quick Bench

Quick Bench conducts a user configurable number of runs (termed Cycles) and then provides the average of those cycles as the result. This can blur out any peak values and show results that are indicative of continued usage. This is particularly relevant when assessing write performance. There is also the option to perform a variety of testing at various file sizes. The option to allow disk cache effects injects pauses between write commands to clear the write cache. Unchecking this box removes the testing of the write caching entirely.

Providing results across numerous file sizes in both random and sequential access both graphically and numerically provides a great representation of the overall storage performance.

The straight lines represent the average speed of the different variations and the curved lines represent the average of the five combined cycles. The random and sequential write speed is remarkably consistent, regardless of the size of file tested.

The highlighted areas indicate both the highest and lowest marks for each test. Here we can note that the random read and write speed with larger file sizes is surprisingly good.

PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.

United States: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon's website.